


Monster and Man

by aliceblue



Category: Cabin in the Woods (2011)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 16:47:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/599950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aliceblue/pseuds/aliceblue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her keepers do not appreciate her. </p><p>He decides his future accidentally. </p><p>(They never meet.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Monster and Man

**Author's Note:**

  * For [recrudescence](https://archiveofourown.org/users/recrudescence/gifts).



(the monster.)

She was reborn in the mind of a child.

The scientists talk amongst themselves, they do not care if she can listen or understand--their only concerns are her looks and her ability to feed.

There was a faux sleep study set up, sold to the public as a test of how television affects the young and impressionable minds of children. In reality the children were feed sugary drinks and sat in front of televisions flickering between channels every 11 seconds for hours upon hours. After the children passed out from exhaustion they were allowed to sleep for three and a half hours, then were awoken and given crayons with orders to draw out their dreams. Each dream drawn earned a promise of thirty minutes of sleep.

A child drew her, another child flinched when shown the image, the scientists found her. 

They make sure that she is a carnivore--she would have been discarded if she wasn’t. She understands that she’s been feed the flesh of some of the other monsters that failed to pass the tests of being horrible and of being deadly.

She resents her keepers. They make sure that she can hear a potential sacrifice, but do not bother to figure out if she can see. They do not appreciate her grace, her elegance, not even when she’s elevated to one of the chosen ones with a prominent trigger item in the ritual.

They do not care that her mind is whole and sound. They do not care that she has her own hopes and dreams--something more complex than wanting to kill and feed on anything in front of her.

They do not realize what she plans to do if she ever gets a chance.

She wants a face. She will have a face. It will not be her own, but she will make it hers. A mask like the doll-strangers wear will not do, she wants something real. Flesh.

She hopes that she is chosen this time. She understands that there are two women, perhaps she will get her face this year. She’s aware that one girl can live if everyone else dies in the right order and if the girl suffers enough. Surely having her face removed will be suffering enough--the scientists won’t even be paying attention anymore--they’ll be partying as usual.

(She was rediscovered in a dream, so perhaps it’s ironic that she dreams so much herself. In her favorite dream, the one she feels the luckiest to have, she's wearing the face of the first scientist who called her the sugarplum fairy as she steps out of a door into the sun. )

 

(the man.)

His future is set in a single moment. He will never understand or realize it.

He’s too busy daydreaming about a movie to pay attention to his teacher walking around the classroom asking what his classmates want to study in college. The answers are all boring--doctor, teacher, astronaut, dental hygienist. It’s the last few days left of his middle school ‘career’--he doesn’t care what she thinks of him anymore. Then she’s standing by him and it does matter what she thinks. He blurts out the first thing that comes to mind. Bioethicist. She looks impressed, and so does everyone else when he keeps repeating it, up to filling out applications to actually study in the field.

(He’ll never admit it, but he only remembered the profession because a few weeks earlier he had been watching a documentary and had stared at the word ‘Bioethicist’ for a few seconds before even realizing it was a real word.)

He’s shallow. He mostly likes that everyone thinks so highly of him, that they create their own futures for him in their minds instead of bothering to ask what he wants to do once it’s time to find a job. He likes their versions of the future--they all come up with impressive careers full of awards and massive paychecks. Only his mother is convinced he’ll never do better than a entry-level job sitting at a desk.

He likes most of his classes and tends to come up with an excuse to take anything that looks interesting. His favorite class though is one a counselor recommended he take-an anthropology class. His professor tells them to write a thesis on any topic mentioned in their book, he chooses human sacrifice.

He writes an impassioned paper on a culture where people were honored to die for their city, for their people, for their future. Where death was required to ensure that the sun would keep rising and those sacrificed were not victims, but instead heroes. 

His professor gave him a B- and commented that he had put too much emotion into the paper, that he should be paying more attention to the archaeological record instead of assigning thoughts and feelings that couldn’t be proven.

Years later, in his six month review, he’ll learn that once upon a time he had been on watch as a potential sacrifice (possibly the scholar or the fool, definitely not the athlete) and that the one paper had removed him from one list and placed him on another. A list of potential recruits.

He has nightmares for a week after that review and contemplates quitting, but convinces himself that if he’s working there they won’t change their mind and set him up for death later.

None of his college friends have any idea what he’s doing with his life, he’s not quite sure what he’s doing either. He’s officially an intern, but honestly? He’s still not quite sure which department he’s interning for. He likes to imagine that one day he’ll be working in the main room, overseeing the world’s continued survival, but his mother’s probably right about how far he’ll go this career or any.

One week he’s preparing descriptions of the monsters, the next he’s researching their ‘biographies’ and writing an analysis on the ‘appeal of their totem objects from an outsider's view”. He spends two weeks researching past events from the American division, and then they abruptly switch him to a project comparing the frequency of locations and participants for Japan’s events.

Japan seems to like using whole classes of kids. Sometimes high school, other times a bit younger. They occasionally switch things up and use families, but the current rumor is that they’re going to use a class again later this year.

If he had to rank an event as his absolute favorite, he can’t stay loyal to his roots. He has to pick the time Japan took a class of kids to an island and left them there. They didn’t even need to summon a monster, the kids took care of things themselves. It’s the most horrifyingly impressive thing he’s ever heard about.

He doesn’t have a favorite monster--he can’t choose if he should ‘like’ the most effective ones, or the ones that he'd be afraid to confront himself. Most scare him, but some terrify him. He learned early on not to mention which ones--hazing never really stops in their line of business. They all have to find releases somewhere. One of his official assignments even ended up being suggesting new creatures to be rotated into the basement based on his co-workers reactions to last year’s batch.

When it comes time to bet he plans to bet on the Buckners, he admires their tried-and-true effectiveness. He’s read the diary more than once--he had to make sure their current mutilations still matched what Patience had written.

He’ll never admit it, but he wants them to be chosen because they’re the ones he feels the most desensitized to. He's not sure he wants to see something new this year.

Maybe next year. He'll be ready then.


End file.
